Buzzword: Boomburg/Boomburb

What they mean. A boomburg is one of the countless cookie-cutter suburban communities that sprung up like mushrooms during the housing booms of recent decades.

A boomburb is a rapidly growing, sprawling city of 100,000 or more on the edge of a major metropolitan area. A boomburb has the look and feel of a big city but generally lacks a large, vibrant downtown. Some are more populated than major cities: Mesa, Arizona, the biggest boomburb in the country, has about 432,000 residents; Minneapolis, 368,000. President Barack Obama delivered an address about the country's mortgage crisis in Mesa on February 18. The president cited 150,000 Arizona homes in or at risk of foreclosure.

It's hard to pin down who coined boomburg and when, but we did find a June 1998 reference on National Public Radio's Weekend Edition program: "Just across the Potomac River from our studios, Northern Virginia is a rapidly developing boomburg. . . . "

Boomburb was first used by Robert E. Lang, Ph.D., a professor of urban affairs and planning at Virginia Tech. Lang says he coined boomburb for a 2001 report published by the Fannie Mae Foundation. "USA Today ran a story on the report and the term caught on," explained Lang in an e-mail. Lang and Jennifer LeFurgy are the authors of Boomburbs: The Rise of America's Accidental Cities (2007, Brookings Institution Press).

Boomburg and boomburb are often used interchangeably even though they're not one and the same. They both obviously convey the notion of boomtown and also represent a boom's inevitable and distressing partner: bust.

Why the buzz? Boomburg and boomburb have returned to prominence as the battered housing market continues to plunge. In "The Ponzi State," in the February 9, 2009, issue of The New Yorker, George Packer wrote about Florida's fast-sinking real estate and the families there who are struggling to stay afloat: "Over the past few years, these inland subdivisions, which are sometimes called 'boomburgs,' appeared as if overnight. Developers dreamed up instant communities and christened them with names evoking the ease of English manor life."

Appropriately enough, President Barack Obama held a town-hall meeting in Fort Myers, Florida, last week and lowered the boom on boomburgs/boomburbs. Replying to an audience question about a regional high-speed commuter rail, the president talked about new transportation systems and mass transit, then entered boomburg/boomburb territory: "The days where we're just building sprawl forever, those days are over. I think that Republicans, Democrats, everybody recognizes that that's not a smart way to build communities."

It might take years for the housing market to stabilize, but when it does, here's hoping that state and local government, planners, and developers do a smarter job of building houses and creating communities that can thrive and last.—Kimberly Janeway